The mailing list has been awash in outrage and suprise as prices rise much higher than most can support

This is one reason I'm always critical of people who blindly say "Move your $X to Google $SERVICE! It's free for $PREDICATE usage!"

TANSTAAFL, even if it is Google. Sooner or later (usually based on how fast $SERVICE reaches some critical mass) you better be willing to pay up. At least the classic software model tells you how much it costs up front.

It's quite scummy really though. They offered it for free or cheap for long enough to allow people to write applications based on it, then pushed up the prices to the point it'd be far cheaper to host them on traditional hosting - but the users couldn't because Google App Engine had proprietary APIs that locked them into that service.

The mailing list has been awash in outrage and suprise as prices rise much higher than most can support

This is one reason I'm always critical of people who blindly say "Move your $X to Google $SERVICE! It's free for $PREDICATE usage!"

TANSTAAFL, even if it is Google. Sooner or later (usually based on how fast $SERVICE reaches some critical mass) you better be willing to pay up. At least the classic software model tells you how much it costs up front.

This is one reason I'm always critical of people who blindly say "Move your $X to Google $SERVICE! It's free for $PREDICATE usage!"

TANSTAAFL, even if it is Google. Sooner or later (usually based on how fast $SERVICE reaches some critical mass) you better be willing to pay up. At least the classic software model tells you how much it costs up front.

I know what you mean, my monthly fees for Google Search, Google Maps, and GMail are *killing* me.

That's kind of the point. Changing your default search engine is very easy, changing your mail provider too, especially if you already use an e-mail client. There are also competing map products, although I don't know how good, but nothing ties you in with the three products GP mentioned.

On the other hand, if you developed an app for the App Engine, using Google's API, it's much more work to port a web application to another platform.

I writing a small hobby web app right now, and I decided to use GAE becaus

Hey, at least the headline and summary use the actual name and not an initialism.

I've seen at least a dozen stories where the headline and summary use some collection of initials and never even say the full name of the technology in question. (And these aren't stories about mainstream topics like HTML, PHP, W3C, IEEE, IETF, etc.)

No, it's not really designed to be an integration point for the various Google APIs. However, you can hit those APIs the same way you can with any other platform (theoretically with lower latency), but there's nothing special about those APIs as it related to Google App Engine.

Through no real fault of your own you are confusing "google apps" with "google app engine".

"google apps" (what you are referring to) lets you run your own domain/business/school/etc using google services including mail/docs/etc. You ALSO get access to google app engine, but it has no real connection to google apps.

"google app engine" is what is being discussed here. It lets you use python or java to write your own web applciations which are run on google's cloud. You get access to google technologies such as big table/auto scaling/etc.

The issue is, google used to have a free model that was quite generous, and a paid model. The paid model actually allows you to "enable" billing, but still get a MORE generous "free" quota. This was amazing, because you could say "I'll spend up to $20 a month on this app, but simply be letting google charge me they'll let me do more for free." A lot of devs on the paid tiers still got free service. Most importantly, there was NO minimum charge per app. If an app wasn't hit a single time, it'd cost you nothing.

Now they have decreased free limits, set a minimum cost per month, and dropped the entire idea of free quotas for paid apps. This means that, for example, some people who had 5 apps deployed and spent $20/month between them now are paying at least $45, and likely several hundred due to removal/reduction of free quotas for paid accounts.

It's now cheaper to use amazon, PLUS you get more control (which can be good or not) for small open source community apps.

They are very reasonable. The free tier looks like it offers enough to replace what I was paying $70/mo for an old server with just 80GB of storage in a colo facility not so long ago. In particular, it looks like it's easier to host low resource servers for 24/7 for free than with AWS.

Reading the comments it looks like some people have gone hog wild on server resource utilization when it was free. One commenter said his free app was using eight 24/7 servers. But if you're using those kind of server resource

It's not a question of if it ever exceeds some number of requests per second as much as the total amount used, when it is a "low resource" app.

With AWS it is actually most expensive per request at the lowest non-zero utilization. If you have a trickle of traffic for 20 hours a day, and low or medium load for a few hours, then AWS is really expensive right in the place where google is free.

The result is that you have a colo or VPS or something to handle the low traffic, and balance off onto AWS when the load

Meh, at that cost ($9/mo?) - developers using it for non-android purposes will move away to a VPS.
Giving the platform really just exclusivity for Android app makers for the publicity perks.
The instance and bandwidth expenses are garbage compared to AWS.

The 9 dollars is just the base fee. If I'm reading this correctly the only thing you get for that $9/month is the ability to pay additional pay-as-you-go usage fees to get more resources; the monthly fee doesn't increase your inclusive resource allocation at all. If your application is actively used most of the time, you'll apparently end up paying quite a bit more [appspot.com]...

If you spin-up an EC2 instance on AWS, with no additional features (like S3, SimpleDB, etc), it will cost you at least $15 a month. (They do have a "free" tier, but that's for the first instance, and not everyone qualifies).

The bigger question, of course, is usage. I need to sit down and really assess a normal app in terms of various resources used. I know that most of those services are dirt-cheap for AWS. (You have to consider that for a decent app, you wouldn't be using the "Micro" EC2, which is the $15

Actually, I seem to remember someone re-implementing the App Engine Python API on EC2. The dm-appengine layer for appengine-jruby is also relevant -- while that project could use a bit of love, it means you should be able to migrate to other datastores reasonably easily.

It used to be possible to burn through those 6.5 hours very quickly, and often for the same reason -- if you didn't have an instance constantly running, you'd burn CPU spinning one up if you got a request every few minutes, because the instance would spin down after a few minutes.

But if you ping it repeatedly, that's a significant amount of CPU lost just keeping it running.

An instance makes a lot more sense. If my app actually fits comfortably in the free tier, I'm probably not getting enough traffic for se